


looking in the dark, with an empty heart

by merthurxmalec



Series: i'll make this feel like home [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Infinity War spoilers, M/M, Pepper Potts Is a Good Bro, Post Avengers: Infinity War, Steve Rogers Feels, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Tony Stark just wants his spiderson back, but he doesnt want to be a bro, it's okay Stevie I got you, that damn flip phone makes an appearance too
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-13
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-09 23:40:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15278769
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merthurxmalec/pseuds/merthurxmalec
Summary: When Steve’s pockets vibrated, he fumbled to reach it at a speed he had never adopted, even in battles where every second counted. Battles were life and death, not so much about skill as about luck; Steve always knew this. Knew that if he was meant to die, he would, his speed or agility be damned.But there was another thing Steve had realised, albeit late. He had realised that there was a difference between life and living. There was a difference between happiness and contentment. A difference between pain and strength. Steve knew this, had realised it as he dropped his shield on the once white snow, now tainted with the crimson colour of himself and his two friends, mixed with pain and loss and betrayal.(Steve drew strength from Bucky’s companionship, but he lamented loss from Tony’s hatred.)Or: Steve pines, Tony weeps and somehow in this messed up process, they begin to heal.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Am I back again with another infinity war angst piece where I cry about stony and irondad&spiderson simultaneously, because that is apparently all I do in life now? Yeppp, you bet I am. 
> 
> Seriously though, guys- the incredible response I got with the last fic was so so amazing, thank you! I'm planning on making this one into a series, spanning from the end of Infinity War canon to something I will figure out soon (hopefully!) 
> 
> This isn't beta'd so all mistakes are my own. Excuse any Britishness please, I tried but I still don't see a difference. 
> 
> (Title is from One Direction's song, 'Home', because I was listening to it the other day and ended up creating a post-CW angsty movie in my head starring stony.)

It was a Wednesday when the call came.

 

When Steve’s pockets vibrated, he fumbled to reach it at a speed he had never adopted, even in battles where every second counted. Battles were life and death, not so much about skill as about luck; Steve always knew this. Knew that if he was meant to die, he would, his speed or agility be damned.

 

But there was another thing Steve had realised, albeit late. He had realised that there was a difference between life and living. There was a difference between happiness and contentment. A difference between pain and strength. Steve knew this, had realised it as he dropped his shield on the once white snow, now tainted with the crimson colour of himself and his two friends, mixed with pain and loss and betrayal.

 

(Steve drew strength from Bucky’s companionship, but he lamented loss from Tony’s hatred.)

 

As he had walked away from Tony in Siberia all those years ago, he had had a sense of peripeteia, a moment in which he wanted nothing but to turn back time and take back everything he just did.

 

But he didn’t. He lived with it. Bucky was everything to him, and he would never regret choosing Bucky, even if he lost everything else in the process.

 

But as he fumbled for the ancient flip phone in this pocket, which he carried around in his pocket in the hope that _someday_ the echoing bells of the phone will herald in a new dawn for him, he wondered if he was ever strong enough to deal with that kind of loss.

 

_Billionaire Tony Stark missing in action,_ the headlines on TV had read, and Steve knew as he flipped the phone open that he would give up his life to hear Tony’s voice on the other end of the phone, no matter how hostile or cold.

 

But when has the universe ever done anything right by Steve?

 

“Hello?” Steve asked slowly, hesitantly, a constant mantra of _please be okay, please be okay, please be okay,_ running through his head.

 

“Steve?” a voice said, familiar but not the one he had been craving to hear.

 

“Bruce?” Steve whispered, still believing, still hoping.

 

But hope, whilst strong, always shattered where Steve was concerned.

 

“He’s gone. Tony is gone.” Bruce said, and Steve felt his world crash.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

It was Wednesday again, 2 weeks after Thanos ripped everything Steve loved away from his calloused hands, quite literally with a snap of his finger.

 

When Steve Rogers was just a kid from Brooklyn, the universe took his mother. But he had Bucky.

 

When Steve Rogers was Captain Steve Rogers, he watched as Bucky plummeted somewhere Steve could not reach him, and he tried to hold on to Peggy, to the vision he had as Captain America.

 

When Steve Rogers was Captain America, he drove his plane into the ice and with that move, he lost everything.

 

And then he woke up, and the large void in his heart full of loss begun to be patched up with a small make-shift family, unconventional, but his own.

 

(And in the midst of that family was a brown-eyed man with a heart that glowed, and Steve lost him too, twice. First, with his own actions, and secondly when the Universe decided to continue with its agenda of fucking with Steve Rogers.)

 

When Steve was a half broken man with nothing to fight for, he lost Bucky, again, and the wind not only swept away Bucky’s ashes but the last bit of what made Steve whole.

 

So when Shuri got intel that another spaceship was about to crash into Wakanda, Steve didn’t care. He grabbed the shield that T’Challa had made for him, not giving a backwards glance to his suit because _who the fuck cares anymore?_ Steve didn’t have anything to live for, but he was an Avenger.

If he is going to die, he’s going to die avenging everything he lost.

 

He stood there, in stance, irrevocably broken but ready to fight.

 

And then he came out.

 

Covered in grime and dirt, cradling his left hand with specks of grey _(ash, Steve realises)_ coating it, and he looks just as broken as Steve feels.

 

Suddenly, it doesn’t matter anymore. The rift the size of the universe in front of them, full to the brim with loss and betrayal and unused flip phones, none of it _matters_ because they lost everything. Siberia felt like a million years ago; the destruction Thanos had brought in his wake made everything feel pale in comparison. Right now, to Steve, there was no such thing as the Avengers Civil War (as the media had so creatively dubbed), there was no video and betrayal, because _none of it mattered anymore._

 

Steve drops it, drops the heavy weight of the shield and instead runs, runs so hard, with every muscle of his body working, racing as if reaching the finish line- reaching Tony- will fill up the gaping hole left in his heart. Steve runs with an urgency he has never quite felt before, because he is _afraid,_ so afraid that if he is even a second late then Tony will slip through his fingers like smoke.

 

Like ash.

 

So he runs, and he envelopes Tony into his arms, tenderly but with force, afraid to break Tony more than he already has but desperate to ground him, to let him know that he is _here,_ he isn’t going anywhere- not again. Steve is a little shocked by the lack of resistance but wavered by the lack of acceptance. Tony does nothing except stand there, limp in Steve’s arms, as if he were already dead.

 

And then, finally, _finally,_ Tony buries his head a little into the crook of Steve’s neck, and Steve feels like he can finally breathe.

 

“He’s gone, Steve,” Tony says, and Steve just holds him tighter in his arms. “I couldn’t save him.”

 

Steve doesn’t ask Tony who he is talking about, does nothing except hold him in his arms, softly stroking his greasy hair.

 

_He’s broken too,_ Steve realises. It isn’t an epiphany by any means- Steve should not have expected anything less. Hell, he’s not going to pretend he didn’t cause a huge chunk of it but this- this still feels like a knife twisting itself into his gut and at that moment, Steve wishes nothing except being able to take it away.

 

He can’t fix it, he knows. Steve is broken too, sure, but his broken pieces are not complementary to those of Tony’s. They don’t fit. But he knows, nonetheless, that he will try.

 

 

 

 

Afterwards, after Tony was checked over by Shuri, his injuries cleaned and bandaged, (Steve did not miss the way Tony ducked his head when Shuri complemented the sticky web-thing Tony had used as a temporary way to close up his wounds, as if to hide tears), after Tony had been fed and bathed, after Steve had held Tony once more against the bath tub as Tony refused to wash himself, refused to wash his hands because _that’s Peter, Steve, that’s my kid I can’t wash away my kid,_ after Steve had tucked Tony into bed and didn’t even try and pretend that he could move away from Tony’s door- only then did he allow himself to slump to the floor and cry.

 

The raw relief Steve had felt when Tony had walked out of that spaceship, that sense of catharsis as Steve, for the first time after a long time, got the feeling that there is something _good_ in the world, one thing that Steve hasn’t lost- all that had melted with each drop of tear from Tony’s eyes, tired and full of pain.

 

When Steve Rogers was 99 years old, no longer Captain America (for he had dropped that mantle long ago in the same snow he had left Tony in), no longer _anything_ at all, mere weeks after he lost his best friend, he lost Tony too. Not physically, like he had in Siberia all those months ago, but emotionally. It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Tony Stark had left himself in an alien planet next to a pile of ash- the man who had returned was nothing but a shell of a body that had been unfortunate enough to remain.

 

Steve didn’t know how to fix it. But he’ll be damned if he didn’t try.

 

As it turns out, Tony didn’t quite like the effort, if his lack of response was anything to go by.

 

For the next coming days Steve tried everything.

 

The day the Avengers (with the addition of Shuri and Rocket) went back to New York, went back _home,_ the first thing Steve did in the privacy of his own room at the compound, still the way he had left it before running to Peggy’s funeral, was call out to F.R.I.D.A.Y.

 

“F.R.I.D.A.Y?” he called out, “could you give me hourly updates on Tony’s whereabouts and what he is doing, please.”

 

He feels a little guilty, spying on Tony, but he needs to make sure Tony is okay. One of the things Steve had learnt the hard way after Project Rebirth (which mainly consisted of both Peggy and Bucky nearly strangling him after an unfortunate mission- a force he never wanted to reckon with again but would gladly give up his life to see, just one more time) was that things will always heal, but not always in the right way. His super healing may fix up his broken bones, but not in the way it is supposed to- for that he would need help.

This thing with Tony is the same. He knows Tony, has lived with him, fought with him and laughed with him for years. Knows Tony’s insecurities that Howard planted in him from the day he was born (and Steve wished he had punched Howard just once for all the pain he caused Tony), knows every scream and whimper Tony tries to hide after a terrible nightmare. He can map out each dark circle under Tony’s eyes after he emerges from a 36 hour work-binge. He knows _Tony_ \- he knows that Tony will heal wrong, and Steve can’t let that happen.

 

“Of course, Captain Rogers,” F.R.I.D.A.Y says. “It is good to see you care about boss, now,” she adds, and Steve realises that he may have accounted the most weirdest things after waking up, but an Artificial Intelligence that hates him may be the straw on the back of the camel.

 

He supposes he deserves it.

 

2 hours later, he walks out of the private elevator towards Tony’s lab, a box of pizza from Lisa’s in his hands (Lisa had not disappeared, and everyone considered it a small miracle).

 

He placed his thumb on the biometric scanner Tony had set up for him a lifetime ago after getting fed up with his persistent knocking _(this is a_ tech lab _, Capsicle- we don’t knock!),_ surprised when it actually works.

He enters, finding Tony hunched over a red and blue suit.

 

“Hey, Shellhead,” Steve says softly, his throating constricting as he watched Tony completely still in a way that could only mean shock. “I brought you some lunch. It’s pizza from Lisa’s- apparently your regular order is pineapple? Since when do you like pineapple pizza?” Steve knows he is babbling, but he can’t help it. The lab is never silent- Tony hates the silence- he always has loud rock music blasting out. On the days when Steve would sit with him and draw whilst Tony worked, Tony would fill the room with mindless chatter.

 

But it was never quiet, not like now.

 

Tony stiffened briefly, but then rearranged himself into a nonchalant position.

 

“Thanks, but I’m not hungry.” Tony replied curtly, going back to his work.

 

“Tony-” Steve started, but then stopped suddenly. He looked down at the suit Tony was working on instead.

 

“What’s that?” he asked softly.

 

“It’s Peter’s suit, I figured out a way to make it disintegration proof. I also added a little snack inventory thing- he nearly fainted whilst on patrol a few weeks ago because he forgot to eat lunch, the idiot.”

 

Tony’s smile was fond, proving that the exasperation in his voice was just a show.

 

“Peter?” Steve asked, cursing himself the moment the words were out of his mouth. Peter was the person Tony lost whilst in space. If the snooping Natasha did was anything to go by _(he was not spying, Sam- fuck you, he was just making sure Tony was okay)_ , he was Tony’s intern and judging by the suit Tony was working on, Spiderman.

 

“Holy shit, I just gave away Peter’s secret identity. Though I suppose you already knew that, what with Romanov tailing me all the time.” Tony said casually, as if he was just discussing the weather.

 

Steve was caught off-guard.

 

“You knew?” he asked, and for the first time in 2 years, Tony looked Steve directly in the eye and cast his trademark Stark smirk.

 

“Of course I did, it’s like she wasn’t even trying to be discreet! Peter nearly had a panic attack when he realised. Thanks for that, by the way- it really was a dream come true explaining to my kid why the Black Widow was stalking him.”

 

“Your kid?” Steve pushed on, because he liked this, liked hearing Tony’s voice when he talked about this kid, soft and as sweet as honey in a way he had never heard, a sense of fond exasperation intertwined with the unwavering love.

 

“Not biologically, though sometimes I wished he was, just so that I could have seen him grow up. I have unofficial joint custody with his aunt, he stays over here on the weekends and a few days in the holidays. I went to his PTA meeting- gave his physics teacher a heart attack with that one. Chaperoned him and his sort-of girlfriend when they went to homecoming. She started questioning me about the ethics behind Stark Industries prosthetics development. You should have seen the kid, he looked absolutely smitten.” Tony laughs, and that is a sound Steve wants to hear all the time.

 

“Tell me about him,” Steve says. 

 

“Peter, he is- really something. If I didn’t know any better, I would have honestly thought you and I somehow managed to procreate,” Steve’s breath hitched, but if Tony noticed he didn’t comment on it, just continued obliviously, looking happy for the first time since he came back. “He is so clever- cleverer than me, even. But he certainly isn’t like me. He became Spiderman because he feels like he owes it to people to help them. Never backs away from a fight- he went after the Vulture without a suit you know- all the grey hairs I have are from him. He is reckless- like someone else I know-“ Tony flashed him a quick smile, and it felt almost like old times. “but he has a heart of gold.”

 

“He sounds special.” Steve said, because he didn’t know what else to say.

 

“He is.” Tony says, quietly. A desperate look sets in his chocolate brown eyes, and Steve curls his hands into a tight ball to stop it from doing something stupid like grab Tony, to cup his face and gently kiss the wrinkles around his tired eyes away. 

 

“I want him back, Winghead,” he says desperately. “I need him back.”

 

“You will get him back, Shellhead,” Steve says.

 

“How? Thanos- he was the endgame. How do we defeat that?”

 

“Together.” Steve says, determined.

 

“And what if we lose?” Tony says. Steve can see it in his eyes, Tony knows what Steve will say next, he wants Steve to say it. Needs to hear it, needs to know that there is someone else who thinks they can fix this instead of assuming he has gone deranged with grief.

 

“Then we will do that together too.”

 

The smile Tony gives him is blinding.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

“I wouldn’t have done it, you know,” Tony said suddenly, his hand pausing on top of his StarkPad where he was doing some sort of calculations in order to figure out how to harness the power of the Time Stone without actually physically having it. Steve looked up from his desk next to Tony’s, his had still bent over the piece he was working on (a drawing of Peter and Tony from the time they had gone to the zoo, like Tony had recounted to him the other day, his hand cradling his orange juice as he cast wistful glances at the bottle of vodka in the kitchen. Steve had to ask Rhodey for a picture of Peter so that he could draw this).

 

“I wouldn’t have killed him. I was pissed when I found out the truth, but it was never at him,” Tony continued, avoiding looking Steve in the eye.

 

“I know,” Steve said apologetically, “I know.”

 

Tony smiled, focusing his eyes once more on his StarkPad.

 

Steve went back to trying to perfect Tony’s smile. He didn’t think he would ever quite manage it.

 

\--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Pepper comes over to the Compound that afternoon.

 

She gives Tony a long hug, allowing Tony to silently sob into her shoulder as he stroked his hair, her engagement ring sparkling as it caught the light coming from the afternoon sun.

 

Steve tried not to let the jealousy show.

 

Next, Pepper came and stood in front of him, ever the strong CEO of Stark Industries, her every movement oozing confidence. For a moment, Steve almost curled inwards as he expected a slap he felt he deserved- a slap for trying to kill her fiancé, for leaving him alone in the snow without a backward glance.

 

_“You were supposed to be his friend,”_ he could almost hear.

 

Instead, Pepper wrapped her arms around Steve too, craning her head a little to reach Steve’s neck.

 

“It’s good to have you back, Steve” Pepper whispers into his neck. From his peripheral vision, he can see Tony looking, and if Steve didn’t know any better he would almost call it fond.

 

Afterwards, when the three of them are all sitting around the dining table with mugs of coffee in their hands, Steve turns to Pepper.

 

“Congratulations on the engagement, by the way,” he says, the smile on his face sincere no matter how much it breaks his heart.

 

“Engagement?” Pepper asks, confused. She glances at Tony, who only looks down, avoiding eye contact. “Tony?” he calls softly, and Tony finally glances up to meet eyes with her. They have a silent conversation for a few seconds, made possible only by years worth of experience and love. Pepper seems to find her answer eventually, because she turns and looks at Steve again with a rueful smile.

 

“We aren’t engaged, Steve,” she begins, and Steve doesn’t need a mirror to know his face is drawn into one of shock.

 

“I had called the press conference to announce Peter as the newest addition to the Avengers,” Tony says, still avoiding Steve’s eyes. “I thought that was what he wanted, but when I told him he refused the position. Said he wanted to stick to the ground, be a friendly neighbourhood Spiderman.” The smile on his face is soft and reminiscent, a look Steve knows Tony only adopts when talking about Peter.

 

Tony swallows once, hard, and Steve can tell that Tony is in another world, _another planet_ , half way across the universe, once again reliving the moment when his kid died in his arms. Steve’s hands itch to intertwine with Tony’s; he only hesitates for a second before doing it, giving Tony’s hands a squeeze. Pepper watches the exchange silently, and Steve can tell as he looks at Pepper’s face that she knows exactly what is going on in Tony’s head, too. Her face, normally carefully arranged to mirror one of impassiveness, is sad too. _She knew Peter, too,_ Steve realises. _She’s hurting too._

As quickly as it came, Pepper recovers and instead proceeds with the story Tony seems incapable of finishing.

 

“We needed something to satisfy the press with, so we told them we’re engaged. It was only supposed to be for a few weeks, but the stock prices for Stark Industries sky rocketed after the announcement- calling it off would have been destructive for the company, so we kept going. We were going to announce our break up just before all this happened.”

 

Steve said nothing, just continued wrestling Tony’s thumb as Tony had started to do sometime as Pepper began to explain everything. It felt- and probably looked- so incredibly domestic, that for a second Steve closed his eyes and allowed himself to imagine it- another universe where they weren’t suffering quite so much.

 


	2. Avengers Assemble

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tony hits a new lead with the whole saving-the-universe-and-his-son business, and Steve falls deeper into the hole of self-depreciation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this was supposed to be up last week. I'm so sorry. I was working on the overall plot for this and that took longer than it was supposed to. I wish this chapter was good, but it really really isn't. It's more like a very basic introduction to the next chapter where all the action happens. 
> 
> Not beta'd so all mistakes are my own, and there probably are many.

It was 3 am on a Wednesday night when the answer finally came.

 

(Seriously, why does everything happen on Wednesdays?)

 

Steve was in the gym, hitting his punching bag repeatedly. Nights like these, Steve could not help but feel especially useless. Tony, Bruce, Shuri- the people with more scientific knowledge that Steve has ever heard of- are the ones most busy in the team, trying to figure out a way to reverse the snap. Thor and his racoon-friend have been busy jumping between planets to find anyone who knows anything at all (Steve went on one of those trips, saw the devastation wreaked in every planet in the universe and was perpetually glad Tony was wise enough to stay out of it). Natasha, Clint and Pepper have all been busy helping out with the reconstruction of New York, too.

 

(The President disappeared, and if there is one positive thing coming out of this, it’s the disappearance of that carrot. Steve wonders if there is a way to reverse the snap but leave that man rotting in the pits of hell).

 

But Steve- he didn’t have anything to do. He didn’t know science like Tony did, nor did he have the authoritative quality Natasha did. Steve was just an experiment which made him good in a fight, but they weren’t fighting anymore. They were grieving, rebuilding and Steve didn’t know how to help with that. He tries the little things- making sure that Tony eats and sleeps since he sometimes forgets he is human and is therefore prone to passing out due to extreme exertion and starvation. He tries to keep the team sane and intact, as close to the way they used to be as he could manage.

 

(He knows it’s not easy- it would have been difficult even a year ago, fresh out of all the tension that came from the Accords and Siberia, and is even more difficult to do so now, 6 months after half the population of the Earth was wiped out as if they never existed at all).

 

And yet, he feels like he isn’t doing enough.

 

The feeling oddly resembles that one he used to have in his beginning days as Captain America, after the serum. When Steve had tried to sign up for the war numerous times, he never expected to come back from it. Maybe that was why Bucky always tried to persuade him not to, but Steve didn’t care, not really. Steve knew that his body could have given up on him any day, it didn’t matter if he was walking down the road or fighting in a trench. Steve knew he had to go- and he damn well wanted to do it on his own terms.

 

So no, Steve Rogers doesn’t like inaction, he doesn’t like sitting around doing nothing. But he didn’t have anything else to do except get ready- so that’s what he did. He trained. He got ready.

 

In one of those nights, as he kept punching the bag Tony had specially made for him not long after they became a team because he was _“sick of buying punching bags like they’re candy, seriously Rogers tone down on the big muscles would ya”_ the genius ran into the gym, looking happier than Steve had seen him in 6 months. The eye bags that arose from 36 hours of virtually no sleep (Steve knew he was working on schematics even after he forced Tony to go to bed last night- F.R.I.D.A.Y loves spying on Tony), his movements still carried a sense of lethargy and discontent that never quite went away (and Steve suspects won’t go away until Tony is holding his son in his arms again) but he looked _happy._

“Do you remember the genius part of genius, billionaire, playboy and philanthropist?’ Well guess what Capsicle, I am a _fucking genius!”_ Tony gave a wide smile, and Steve didn’t find it in himself to tell him off for his language.

 

“Do you have a way?” Steve asked, tensely. In the years that followed after Siberia, Steve had slowly felt the optimism he was once famous for slowly dripping away, like the beginnings of a summer rain. But Tony’s brilliance has never failed to falter him, because Tony has never disappointed them with it.

 

“I have the schematics of one,” Tony said, a smile on his face. His eyes took the faraway look it often did when he talked science. “Have you ever heard of the theory of the multiverse, Winghead?” Tony asked. Steve began to answer but Tony interrupted him with a finger pointing to him, all the while opening up an invisible whiteboard, his entire being vibrating with energy.

 

“Theoretically,” Tony began, “there are an infinite number of earths within our universe.” He drew a few circles next to each other on the board. “Say there is an earth in which the Nazi’s won World War One, or an Earth where the Avengers were never formed. Or there may simply be earths which move at a slower pace than we do. So, on this earth Thanos just invaded” Tony gulped as he said that, before shaking himself and carrying on, “but on another earth maybe you haven’t been dug out of the ice yet, or I haven’t gone to Afghanistan yet. It doesn’t mean that it won’t happen- it just means that they haven’t reached the same point in time yet. This means that, theoretically there is an universe out there where Loki is yet to go all Trickster on us. Our goal is to go to that universe and get Loki.”

 

“And how are we going to travel between universes?” Steve asked, deciding this is probably the most obvious of the 14735 questions currently floating around in his brain.

 

“Glad you asked, Capsicle,” Tony said, grinning. “You see, the space-time continuum is a very stable thing. That is why people have never been able to rupture it without any sort of mythical help. Unfortunately, the guy who can perform the party tricks for us decided to turn to turn himself and half the universe to dust to save my magnificent but pathetic ass, thus leaving it all to me. Since I don’t possess any of those whammy-jammy powers, we have to do this through good old science. Anyways,” Tony continued before Steve could tell Tony off for his usual self-depreciation, “even the most stable particles have a point in which they can be radicalised. We basically need to radicalise the universe by pumping enough energy through it that it creates a sort of breach through which we can enter.”

 

“But how do we do that?” Steve says, feeling as if he is missing something obvious.

 

“We don’t know yet,” Tony admits quietly, looking down, an adorable blush creeping up his ears as if he is embarrassed about not knowing how to create a fluke in the universe. “Shuri thinks there may be a way to create some sort of particle accelerator that could do it, but it’s a very large-scale thing and not exactly what they teach in MIT. We’re working on it.”

 

Steve smiled, placing a hesitant hand on Tony’s shoulder.

 

“You’ll figure it out, Tony. You always do.”

 

\-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

 

The answer came a couple of weeks later, late Wednesday night. It was one of those rare nights since everything happened that Tony, Bruce and Shuri were not in the labs, but instead the whole team were up in the common room area in the compound. Natasha and Clint were trying to furiously convince Shuri to watch ‘Empire Strikes Back’ but Shuri was firm in insisting that they should watch ‘Batman vs Superman’ because it “hits so close to home it’s hilarious.” They watched as Shuri tried to blackmail Clint and Nat into agreeing, and Steve could not help but let a small chuckle rise from deep in his throat.

 

“If this is the future of the Avengers” Steve said with a grin “I feel like I could die in peace.”

 

Tony didn’t comment on his morbidity, but rather hummed to signal his consent. “It would be much, much worse if Peter was here. He hates DC films, insists that the Avengers are the coolest team of superheroes to ever exist so any other fictional superhero is an insult to our existence.”

 

Tony’s voice hit the low, in the way it usually does whenever he mentions Peter, and Steve could do nothing except place a supportive hand on his shoulder.

 

“I changed my will a few months ago, you know,” Tony said, still watching the exchange between Shuri and the rest of the team. “I named Peter as my heir- to the company and as the benefactor of the Avengers. I was going to tell him on his 17thbirthday, with his Iron Spider suit and another invitation to become an Avenger. That was going to be next week, but alas.” Tony tried to muster up a grin, that trademark Stark smirk that stopped fooling Steve a long time ago. Steve searched deep inside him for an answer, for anything that could help him lessen some of Tony’s grief. He returned empty handed.

 

F.R.I.D.A.Y’s voice from above them saved Steve from voicing his incompetence.

 

“A streak of lightning has been spotted running through Brooklyn,” she said.

 

“Well, F.R.I, dealing with the weather is a little below our pay-grade.”

 

“Yes, sir, but there seems to be a man in the lightning. He is currently moving at a speed of 578,967,507 m/s.”

 

F.R.I.D.A.Y’s proclamation caused the team to stop in their tracks.

 

“That’s faster than the speed of light,” Bruce said.

 

“Brucie-bear, that is faster than the speed of anything.” Tony’s voice seemed to be edging with fear.

 

Steve clapped his hands.

 

“Well alright then team, you know the drill.” Steve looked at the team, each of them getting ready to fight.

 

 “Avengers Assemble.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any guesses as to who this streak is? 
> 
> P.S. No offence to any DC fans. I love DC, this just seems to be something Peter would be stubborn about. 
> 
> Scream at me on my Tumblr: starsinourinfinities

**Author's Note:**

> Come scream at me on my Tumblr: starsinourinfinities 
> 
> P.S. I'm so sorry for the abrupt ending; it just didn't feel natural to put the next part I have planned into this part. 
> 
> Updates should be done by next Friday, hopefully.


End file.
